Benjamin Wachs: Outside interests wresting local control

Every election is becoming a referendum on national politics and, as a result, fewer and fewer politicians find themselves answering primarily to the people who cast the votes.

Benjamin Wachs

On vacation, driving across parts of this country I haven’t seen before, it’s obvious how rmany of our political differences take physical form. The coastline environments have one kind of relationship to the people who live there, the great plains another. The desert and the corn fields encourage different philosophies of life, which naturally show up at the ballot box. Long winters and endless summers encourage different kinds of leadership.

Even with only 13 original colonies, our Founding Fathers were suspicious about any form of government where decisions were made too far away from the people they affected. The original Articles of Confederation were meant to keep that from happening, by rooting all relevant power at the state and local level. The result was less than catastrophe but short of success, and so they found an American solution through American pragmatism: create a form of central government that still relied on republican principles, wherein the people affected by faraway decisions in the nation’s capital at least get to select the people who make them.

That uneasy balance of power has worked for a long time, but now is being undermined — not by government tyranny but by our own citizens. Often, and ironically, the citizens most intent on preserving local authority are the ones most eager to sabotage local elections. Just not their own.

That’s because, in a big money political culture that is both more polarized and more homogeneous than ever (television and the internet serving to smooth over the rough edges and unique shapes of geography), outside interest groups pumping in massive amounts of money and fielding candidates of their own are often a deciding factor in local elections.

From liberal groups finding and funding a challenge from the left to Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln to tea party groups from around the country sending money to senatorial candidate Scott Brown or congressional candidates in upstate New York, elections that were meant to be local are being fought, funded, waged and occasionally won by outside interests who have no stake in the district or state itself. Every election is becoming a referendum on national politics and, as a result, fewer and fewer politicians find themselves answering primarily to the people who cast the votes.

Though legitimate in principle, this threatens the very concept of representative democracy in practice. It doesn’t matter who represents the people officially if they answer to oligarchs. I recognize that tea parties and MoveOn represent highly unusual oligarchs when put next to Goldman Sachs and the oil companies, but to the extent that they deliberately drive out candidates who accurately represent the people of a district and replace them with candidates who are answerable to outside interests, that’s what they are becoming. We need to be saved from the national activist groups every bit as much as we do the big corporations. Indeed, at the extreme, the corporations fund the activist groups, leading to a double headed monster.

For some time in this country we — and the Supreme Court — have been attached to the notion that spending money is a form of speech worthy of protection. It’s a nice idea, but it’s undermining local democracy. If local people, who don’t have a lot of money but do represent the views of their districts, are being driven out of politics, then we no longer have a government by or for the people. It is time to turn American pragmatism into an American solution. Campaign finance reform, publicly funded elections, may be not be needed in principle — but like the Founding Fathers, we are called upon to make democracy work in practice.

Even if we want a country where millions in outside dollars are allowed to flow in and sabotage local elections, we can’t have it if we also want local control.

Benjamin Wachs writes for Messenger Post Media's print and online editions. Read his work at www.TheWachsGallery.com.